The Wanderer

My old maps showed me how to leave Point A and head to points unknown

I left the east coast at the age of 23 with four cardboard boxes, a Playmate cooler and a
map.

Actually, I
had multiple maps, a fistful of TripTiks highlighted in yellow by an affable
AAA employee—circuitous routes that would deliver me from Washington, D.C., to
my new, uncharted life.

I had to
go. For months, I'd been waking up with a knob of dread deep in the belly, a
repetitive, minor chord of gloom. Yes, I had a good job. I met friends for beer
on Connecticut Avenue and spent Sunday mornings sprawled on the grass of Dupont
Circle, with a bagel and the Sunday Times. I loved my button-sized apartment, where I stashed my bicycle behind the
futon and propped a 12-inch black-and-white television on shelves made of cinderblocks
and pine.

When you're
23, it's hard to diagnose unhappiness, especially when your life bears the
outward gleam of success. To my parents and editors, I was thriving: writing
about cops and courts for The Washington Post, zipping from a methamphetamine
bust in Spotsylvania County to a front-page feature about the most temperate D.C.
summer in 22 years.

But I could
hear it, feel it: an insistent chime of restlessness. A sense that my life
waited somewhere outside the Washington Beltway. A growing conviction that if I
didn't leave now, I'd be shackled until I was gray. "You'll never go; you're
the queen of bondage," a college pal said in April. By June, I'd given notice
and packed the car.

I was
headed to become a VISTA volunteer—like the Peace Corps, but in the United
States and with only a one-year commitment—in Portland, Oregon, with stops in
Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania; Columbus, Ohio; Chicago; St. Louis; Kansas City; Omaha;
Denver; the Grand Canyon and Bakersfield, California, before wiggling up I-5 to
a city I'd never seen.

"If you
went any further, you'd be in the ocean," my mother observed, her voice tight with
worry and regret. "Just be careful," said my dad. I unfolded my maps, showed
them my route, even typed out a day-by-day itinerary of the friends' couches
and youth hostels where I planned to bunk on the way.

The maps
were a lie. No, not exactly a lie. More like a ruse, a way of persuading my
skeptical family (and some envious friends) that I knew where I was going. In
truth, after two decades of following the path-more-traveled, it was map-lessness
I craved.

In
Ohiopyle, where I was the sole guest at a youth hostel near the Great Allegheny
Passage, a middle-aged man (the son of the hostel manager) asked me to marry
him. I said no. In Columbus, a goateed grad student took me out for beer and
quoted Yeats: "The silver apples of the moon; the golden apples of the sun." I
bought ramen—10 packets for a dollar in the supermarket in St. Louis—and stood
at grubby youth hostel stoves, doctoring my dinner with cubed tofu and
tomatoes. Anything could happen. A meal
of catfish and a tour of one-room schoolhouses with a friend in Omaha. A drive
from Durango to the Grand Canyon with an ASL interpreter I'd met just hours
earlier; he taught me the sign for "connect," and when we hugged goodbye near
the canyon's south rim, a double rainbow hurdled the sky.

The next
morning, when I stood with a group of shivering strangers to watch the sun rise
in ropes of gold and pink, a Japanese tourist took a sharp inhale. "Here comes
it!" she sighed. I learned that the Colorado River had etched out the Grand
Canyon at the rate of about one inch per century. Who needed to hurry?

After two
years dictated by deadlines—6 p.m., and that school board article had better be
in editor Walter Douglas's hands—time pooled around me. I drove for eight
hours, or fourteen, or none (sure, why not spend an extra day in Lincoln City?);
I crawled into my sleeping sack when I got tired and woke without a clock.

At night, I
unfolded my maps, their colors a little wan from days on the dashboard, their
creases pliant as skin. I was a long way from home, the small, starred circle
that was Philadelphia. At the same time, the maps made "home" seem arbitrary, a
place one happened to be born, a tack stabbed into a scrim of endless
possibility.

Could I
seek refuge in Hyde Park? Find my tribe in Portland? Become a carpenter's
apprentice and learn to frame walls in Northern California? How would I know
when I'd arrived?

Ancient
explorers feared and yearned for the unmapped world. Their imaginations were
two-dimensional; sea monsters and cannibals, perhaps, lurked beyond drawn borders.
A ship might sail right off the edge. They didn't know yet that the earth was round,
that every journey is more loop than line.

My trip
lasted three long, brief weeks. After a dusty night in Bakersfield—the only
night I spent in a motel, and the loneliest—I got my first adult glimpse of the
Pacific Ocean, and I stopped the car and wept.

Then I
phoned the woman I'd spent weeks leaning toward, tiptoeing from, then leaning
toward again, the one who had curled on my futon until 5 a.m., unkissed, the
night before I left D.C., while a Windham Hill cassette played over and over.
The woman who said, once we were a chaste 150 miles apart, "You know, I think I
fell in love with you a little bit."

Recently, while
digging in my Philadelphia closet for a stepladder, I found the plastic bucket
of maps from that journey. Who needs them anymore, with GPS loaded into every
smart phone, disembodied voices telling us when to turn left? "Recalculating.
Recalculating," my phone bleats, while I make a U-turn on the Admiral Wilson
Boulevard.

My old maps didn't talk. At least, not out loud in vaguely British accents. But they showed me how to leave Point A and head to points unknown. They noted where the jagged mountains lay, and that it was possible to pass through them unscathed. There were big blue roads and smaller red roads, greeny swaths of national forest and beckoning splotches of blue (skinny dipping in Lake McConaughy, anyone?). They whispered that I was not the queen of bondage. They promised I would find my way.

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